Plans, and the planning thereof

[nny]

Sometimes you're so used to living your life a certain way that it takes something outside that to make you go... oh. I - really? Wow. And then suddenly everything makes a little more sense, y'know?

So I did this psychology professor's questionnaire thing in the hopes of winning £30. Yes, it has got to that point in the term. Anyway, it was a whole bundle of questions about a whole bundle of issues, but all of the questions had the same sort of bent, and then you plotted onto a graph how you felt when you thought about the issue, with high/low arousal(excitement)/stress. Pattern? Not Long In Coming.

Do you want the thing? Yes.
Do you think about having the thing? Yes.
Is the thing important to you? Yes.
Do you know how you could get the thing? Sometimes yes. Ish. Not precisely.

Do you have a plan for getting the thing?

...

Universally, the answer to that is no. Food budgeting, using less electricity, recycling more, getting a great job, feeling happy... yes I want it. No I haven't thought about how I'm going to get it. And my arousal/stress level? Generally pretty damned high. One of those really freaking obvious moments that suddenly puts everything into perspective.

So I guess I'm wondering:

a) Do you have plans?
I totally understand if you don't want to talk about them with me - although I'd love to hear them if you do - but a yes/no would be great.

b)How do you make plans?
So here we're not talking ambitions, hopes, dreams... we're talking actual plans with an actual process. A timescale, even, maybe. The way you go about getting what you want.

Is it lists? Software/apps? Flowcharts? A series of increasingly frantic post-it notes?

If you've the time to share, I'd really love to hear.

(PS I'm probably going to be very poor next year in order to get library experience, so I'm gonna start with grocery planning, I think, and go from there...)

♥

Comments

[silveraspen]

I do. I plan lots of things - not everything, but I do plan on a regular basis.

It helps me to start by breaking a problem (or a goal) into the component parts or a series of steps that over time will lead to where I want to be.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits does a great job of talking about how to do habit modification in small steps that lead to lasting change. Pretty much anything can be habitualized. Most of the website content is free; I picked up a copy of his "Zen to Done" and have found it very helpful. It's a modification of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" process (also very helpful, but sometimes overwhelming) that focuses on prioritization and scaling rather than the everything approach.

[resonant]

I love planning; most of the time I get way more satisfaction out of the planning than out of the doing. (Owning this, I've actually begun to indulge myself in the elaborate planning of vacations that I don't really want to take.)

When it comes to things I actually intend to do, I was very struck by an insight from a time management book: most people put the most effort not into the things that are most important or most urgent or easiest, but into the things where their goals are clearest.

So, like, instead of "food budgeting," you could say, "Taking lunch to work/school 3 days a week" or "Creating menus so I don't buy food and then not cook it."

From parenthood I learned that positive goals ("Keep every drop in the cup") work better than negative ones ("Don't spill it").

[beachlass]

This is very helpful, thank you!

[vivien]

Lists! I rely on lists. Format not as important as getting thoughts down. Sometimes when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'll make a list of things to do including easy tasks (i.e. take a shower) I can cross off - crossing off makes you feel good.

I also do things like "Okay, you can have a nap now, but when you get up, you will do ____ first thing" or "Saturday morning I will wake up and _____ while I make my tea". I find programming myself helps.

[soupytwist]

I do a lot of planning these days in one way or another. I think the note above about specificity is excellent: "be a better person" is a good goal in theory, but in practice, that's impossible to measure, it's too easy to shift with your mood. "Give £x to charity" or "volunteer one evening a week" or whatever is measurable.

Like, with the house thing. When I first thought about it, it was much more like, "one day I want to own a house and be a happy and settled person with a cat" type thing. But then I realised, okay, I can't guarantee the happy and settled with a cat, but if I want it to happen at all, I need to find out if I can get a mortgage. That's Thing 1 That Has To Happen If This Idea Is To Become Reality. So I went to see mortgage people and did some googling. I tried very hard not to even think about any of the rest of it, because it was too big a thing, it didn't fit in my head. And then once I found out, hey, I CAN get a mortgage, that was when I worked out how I was going to deal with Thing 2 (getting it confirmed, deciding which mortgage). And then when I'd done that, Thing 3 (which house did I want?).

I love habitrpg.com for that because it rewards you for breaking your tasks down into steps. So I have "put laundry into washing machine", "hang up laundry", "put away clean laundry" as three different tasks. I find the focus on each step, rather than the whole thing, SO much easier.

Oh, and the other thing that has really helped is keeping on reinforcing to myself that SOMETHING is better than nothing. I used to really, really often make big plans for a day.... and then I woke up at 3pm and realised I would never finish those plans, so I wrote them off entirely. I would say to myself, "well I can't finish that today, so I will start tomorrow!. Only the next day, the exact same thing would happen. It was a way of putting something off that I was scared of, that seemed too big. But if I tell myself - and I mean, literally, speaking to myself in my head like, "come on, Katie!" - that even doing ten minutes is better than zip, that it DOESN'T MATTER that I won't do as much as I planned as long as I still do something, then I am much more likely to do anything.

I mean, none of these are magic solutions - I still find it hard, and it's much more about an overall change in the aggregate than it is about making any individual thing happen.

*hug*

[beachlass]

HOW DOES PLANS???

Wow, did I relate to this. And I'm going to spend some time reflecting on it.

Thank you for the insight-by-proxy.

[skygiants]

As we have discussed, in the small-scale/short-term sense, the more unscheduled time I have, the more I plan! It's the only way I have found to make myself get things done, instead of sitting around thinking I will do them.

In the long term, I tend to plan ... well, vaguely and in the short term. OK, in the next three months, I will try and accomplish this; if I have not accomplished Plan A, I will attempt Plan B, and so on. So I try to make sure I always have an alternate B for when Plan A fails, but Plan A and Plan B are usually both very broad...

[la_rainette]

I don"t plan much and I am the queen of procrastination... but I have found that I can Do Things if I take it small, like, don't say "I shall tidy all the tings!" but rather, ok, I am going to work on this for one hour, and then I get a reward. It's ok to not do it all at once.

(Well, somebody rec'ed me an awesome book that I think you should read too... will email about it soonishly, because right now you have too many things on your place already, but I think you'll find it TREMENDOUSLY helpful. :D )